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Cuba to Florida swim nailed by 64-year-old

Veteran US swimmer Diana Nyad successfully completes a 117 km marathon crossing from Cuba to Florida, becoming the first person to do so without a protective shark cage.

But two days after jumping into the ocean in Havana, she knew she was getting close to Key West. She paused, treading water, to thank her crew. She was three kilometres from shore, and nothing would stop her.

"This is a lifelong dream of mine and I'm very, very glad to be with you," Nyad said, bobbing in the water, apologising for the slurred speech emitting from her swollen lips. "So let's get going so we can have a whopping party."

Then, after 52 hours, 54 minutes 18.6 seconds and almost 180 kilometres, Nyad crawled out of the water and staggered onto Smathers Beach as hundreds of onlookers cheered and blew conch shells. Her face was puffy, her legs unsteady and her skin, marinated in saltwater, looked like sandpaper.

Yet Nyad, who only stops talking when she's not swimming, had the strength to share the inspiration of her record feat.

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"I got three messages," she said. "One is, we should never ever give up. Two is, you're never too old to chase your dreams. Three is, it looks like a solitary sport, but it's a team."

Diana Nyad emerges from the Atlantic Ocean after completing a 180-kilometre swim from Cuba to Key West, Florida. Photo: AP

On her fifth and what she swore was her final attempt, Nyad became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the drafting aid of a shark cage.

She did it 10 days after her 64th birthday, which makes her accomplishment even more incredible. Not just because she's a woman who has been empowering women with her examples of endurance for decades. Not just because she keeps proving that old is a state of mind and that she is, as she says, "in the middle of middle age." But because she first tried this epic crossing in 1978, as a 28-year-old, and refused to abandon her goal.

Diana Nyad manages a smile for a young admirer while receiving medical treatment following a 180km swim from Cuba to Key West, Florida. Photo: AFP

Despite four aborted attempts, jellyfish stings that scarred her arms and chest, ferocious currents and unpredictable eddies that dragged her far off course, sharks, storms, hallucinations, nausea, hypothermia and the one thing no oceanographer, marine biologist or physician could address - doubt - Nyad could not let go of her dream. She could not erase her vision of her arrival in Key West, emerging from blue world into green world, symbolic of man's evolution.

After 35 years, her journey is complete.

She made the trip by singing Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Neil Young songs to herself in rhythm with her 3km/h, 50-strokes-per-minute, metronomic pace. She followed a white streamer by day, adorned with red lights at night, that was attached to a 7.5-metre boom off the starboard side of her support boat Voyager. Kayakers and shark-scouting divers kept an eye out for predators. Angel Yanagihara, a box jellyfish expert from the University of Hawaii, was on the lookout for venomous "boxies" that have ruined previous attempts. She administered "Sting Stopper" gel to Nyad's face. On the first night, Nyad also wore a claustrophobic, abrasive but protective silicone mask that looked like something a lucha libre wrestler would wear. Ideal conditions kept the jellyfish from swarming.

Nyad paused - never hanging on to the boat - every 90 minutes or so for protein drinks, bananas, peanut butter or pasta except on Sunday night, when she was vomiting constantly.

A storm increased swells to three to five feet but the current remained favourable. Nyad got fatigued and disoriented at times but still remembered to stop on Sunday morning to sing "Happy Birthday" to a crew member while floating on her back.

The people who accompanied Nyad across the Florida Straits through two long black nights (best friend Bonnie Stoll has been on each swim) and the people who waded and paddled alongside her the last 180 metres were overcome with emotion. All saw a little of themselves in Nyad's struggle.

Nyad, who began swimming as a youngster at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale while reading books about polar explorers, wrote in her memoir Other Shores that she seeks challenges in order to "dig deeper and deeper into your gut until you arrive at that same core of pride and dignity that survivors know."

She was sexually abused as a teen and swimming helped her cope. Later, International Swimming Hall of Fame chief Buck Dawson encouraged her to be an open water swimmer. She set records circumnavigating Manhattan Island in eight hours and going 193 kilometres from Bimini to Juno Beach in 27.5 hours. In 1979 she retired and stopped swimming for 30 years.

As she neared 60, the Cuba-Florida swim taunted the exuberant Nyad like an unfinished finish line. She wanted the "high of a commitment." In 1978, inside a shark cage, she swam 42 hours and 122 kilometres before currents defeated her. Australian Susie Maroney completed the swim in 1997 in less than 24 hours, but in a shark cage pulled behind a boat.

Nyad, who lives in Los Angeles, tried again without a cage, twice in 2011, then in August 2012, going 51 hours and 160 kilometres before stings to her lips and powerful eddies forced her to exit.

This time, Nyad would not be beaten by Mother Nature. The swim began at Havana's Hemingway Marina, named after former resident Ernest Hemingway, whose novel The Old Man and the Sea contained the Nyad elements of age and grit.

Beforehand, Nyad prepared in Key West, where the first sign of good fortune occurred when she met a stranger of Cuban descent who didn't know who she was but gave her a $2 bill his grandmother had given him years earlier for good luck on his voyage from Cuba to the United States. She intends to pass it on.

She stayed at a friend's cottage, where a photo of a man contemplating the sea hangs on a wall, inscribed with a passage from Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Salt." No coincidence that Nyad hears subliminal poetry when she swims.